Double Honours For Snell & Wilcox At NAB

Snell & Wilcox earned top honours at the NAB2007 exhibition this year, receiving the Broadcast Engineering (BE) Pick Hit Award for the iCR automated content repurposing workstation, and a Television Broadcast (TVB) NAB2007 Top Innovation Award for the new Alchemist Ph.C – IP file-based standards conversion software.
The BE Pick Hit Award, the industry's longest-running new product technology award, is presented to the most technologically innovative products and those most likely to make a meaningful impact on the broadcast and film industries. TVB's Top Innovation Award, nominated by industry professionals and selected unanimously by the editorial team of Television Broadcast magazine, recognizes products that combine innovative technical achievement with workflow and cost efficiencies.
"To take advantage of new business opportunities in today's rapidly evolving market, broadcasters and content owners must have an efficient means of processing content for delivery in any standard and to virtually any platform," said Joe Zaller, vice president of strategic marketing at Snell & Wilcox. "We designed both the iCR and Alchemist Ph.C – IP systems to deliver this efficiency and functionality, and we're pleased that their unique feature sets and capabilities have been recognized with the prestigious Pick Hit and Top Innovation awards."
The iCR automated content repurposing workstation enables broadcasters and content owners to master content once and concurrently repurpose it for multiple distribution platforms. In a single workstation, iCR combines best-in-class image conditioning tools, content mastering, quality control (QC), and content repurposing functionality to deliver superior image quality while drastically reducing the time required for repurposing. This concurrent processing capability, combined with integrated, automated QC tools, allows iCR to give users the lowest cost per deliverable — whether the output is for broadcast, VOD, mobile TV, portable media players, or Internet/Web publishing — while delivering high-quality results.
Alchemist Ph.C – IP revolutionizes file-based international program exchange by bringing standards conversion entirely within the file-based domain. This software-based addition to the industry-leadingAlchemist Ph.C standards conversion product line runs on the company's iCR platform and delivers transparent bidirectional conversion of video, audio, and metadata between 50-Hz and 60-Hz television standards. This level of quality was previously available only in high-performance hardware systems, forcing quality-conscious companies to decode file-based content to baseband for tape-based standards conversion and then re-ingest that content. Alchemist Ph.C – IP eliminates this costly workflow and offers a radical improvement in quality over other software-based converters currently on the market.
More information about iCR, Alchemist Ph.C – IP, and other Snell & Wilcox products is available at: www.snellwilcox.com
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